Rapid Rapid,

My poetic sensibilities -- however meager -- have been exhausted. Propensity for rambling however, is still intact.

There are not enough stars in Boston. Stars, like the kind in the sky, which depending on how far you are, could be the icy tips of invisible stalactites or possibly, mutilated balls of burning gas floating aimlessly through a black void. Fortunately, we are very, very far, and the air outside is -- as it happens without fail in this neck of the woods in Maine -- very, very cold. So cold, in fact, that it feels like a different shade of cold every time I step outside, as if the particular combination of the stars and the wisps of clouds and the dry, clear night elicit a sort of poetic amnesia. A short term memory loss brought on by feelings of metaphysical insignificance, in turn brought on by the looming face of infinity every time I look up. Then there's the desire to record every drop of sensation somehow--in words, in calculable thoughts (etch it in the temporal lobe, practice dreaming), in action. But what performance of a verb could possibly capture frost? Or the cruel bent of a tree branch? In fact, I can tell you it's hardly cruel at all in the daylight, and that bodily ache of mine for a word or a sentence, a tome, a treatise on my right to be here, all but disappears after I've digested breakfast. This is the time of day when more than just thought comes into the light. Revelations. A remedy for hate in other people's countries, or for love in mine. No, nothing nearly so important. Whims. Insights. Poetry a delusion, a false celebration that we've mastered and intensified our experience and somehow established a nameless corner of humanity against the blank wall just beyond our crystalizing breath. But what it celebrates, indeed, deifies, is worth the falsehood. The critic T.E. Hulme hated romanticism, thought it mystical nonsense. But when I'm standing here, home but not home, the trees empty, having given their way to the freedom of spacious leaflessness, I wonder if he was just missing the point of his own insight:

By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic...You don't believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

Here's to spilt religion: futile metaphors and wordless mumblings: prayer, expression, and the failure of both: to leaves, trees, the grass and the birds: quiet despair, rambling exultation, and the faint vibrations of stars in the firmament, in the dark, on cold, cold nights.

The coral reef has died due to global warming.

Sea Horse: Look! I am pregnant!

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Sea Horse: And a man!

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Sea Horse: I bear an uncanny resemblance to John Kerry!

When I look like I'm staring into space when you're talking to me or if I have my eyes closed in the middle of the night, it's not because you're boring or because I'm tired -- although I'm sure you are and I am. In fact, I'm preparing for my vocation as an art/literary/film critic, in case the Modernist movement or Classical Hollywood Cinema ever runs an ad campaign of 30-second TV spots. However, the profundity of my criticism loses its force after one or two sentences, so it must be delivered as sound-bites.

Cubism: put as wallpaper in the room where you will be caffeinating in preparation for the morning commute. Let your eyes lose focus and bathe in your ability to see objects from twenty-seven different angles -- your post-modern existence necessitates it. You never knew the perfect woman until you went to a brothel in Avignon and met mademoiselle poly-backo-frontal-profile-deconstructionist-africanmaskface nude.

The Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein: although he probably has never seen this movie, I know his reaction already. Upon seeing the 90th intertitle containing the words "brothers" and "revolution" used twice in the same sentence, he would shake his head, mutter a word beginning with the letter "p" and ending with the sound "ropaganda," then say something about a "sledgehammer to the spectator's head," before promptly walking away to play ultimate frisbee in the dark.

Wagner: Nazi sympathist.
Ezra Pound: eloquent Nazi sympathist.

Casablanca, Michael Curtiz: sentimental, in a way that makes you feel guilty for secretly wanting some of the characters killed for the sole purpose of making the film self-consciously avant-garde, and thus confer intellectual superiority on you, the spectator. But alas, the bubbly I'm-clearly-taking-film-class-as-a-core girl in the row behind you is weeping in joy at the manifest affirmation of romance and human goodness. Yes, that goodness.

Higanbana, Yasujiro Ozu: chinese melodrama, without the melodrama. And Japanese. What a good movie.

L'enfant Noir, Camara Laye: just read the last chapter. You're not culturally insensitive -- you simply don't have time to learn about animist rituals but are willing to be enriched by the universalizing power of puppy love and a doting mother's reverse Oedipus complex. Did I mention the intricate yet accessible prose? Imagine squinting really hard and admiring a delicate flower. Never mind the vocabulary you're too lazy to look up; this book simply can't be ignored by any self-aggrandizing language snob. There's no sex, sorry. For that you will have to go to an art museum. Just don't let the expressionists rain on your party.